The Industrial Revolution

At the time when America was engaged in a revolution to win its independence,
a revolution of perhaps even greater importance was in progress in England:
the emergence of modern industrialism. Hand-operated tools were being replaced
by power-driven machines, which permitted manufacturing to become more rapid and
extensive. This had profound social and economic consequences. This industrial
revolution was challenging, and often shattering, centuries of traditions, of
social patterns, of cultural and religious assumptions.

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, nothing even remotely
comparable to the English industrial revolution was occurring in America. In
fact, it was opposition to this kind of economic growth occurring in England
that had helped the Republicans defeat the Federalists in 1800. Yet even while
Jeffersonians warned of the dangers of rapid economic change, they were witnessing
a series of technological developments that would eventually ensure the transformation
of the United States. A number of immigrants with advanced knowledge of English
technology arrived in the United States eager to introduce new machines, such as the
spinning mill, to America. But there was technology of domestic origin as well. The
cotton gin, which allowed a single operator to clean as much cotton in a few hours as
a group of workers had once needed a whole day to do, is one of the most important examples.

But industrialization requires a transportation system that allows the efficient
movement of raw materials to factories and of finished goods to markets. There was
no such system in the United States in its early years, and thus there was no domestic
market extensive enough to justify large-scale production. But efforts were under way
that would ultimately remove the transportation obstacle. In river transportation, a
new era began with the development of the steamboat. Meanwhile, the era that would become
known as the turnpike era had begun too; toll roads ran from town to
town[1]. Although the railroads
played but a secondary role in America's transportation system in the 1820's and 30's,
the work of the railroad pioneers became the basis for the great mid-century surge of
railroad building that would link the nation together as never before. Railroads eventually
became the nation's number one transportation system, and remained so until the construction
of the interstate highway system halfway during the twentieth
century[2].

The late nineteenth century belonged to the railroads. They were of crucial importance
in stimulating economic expansion, but their influence reached beyond the economy and was
pervasive in American society at large. The story of the Iron Horse in nineteenth-century
America is one with many aspects and paradoxes and deserved a closer look. Which
technological developments brought forth the railroads, and how were they managed once they
grew beyond small companies? What role did they play in the turbulent times of the
Civil War? How did they change the American landscape
and its native people? What did the railroads mean to politicians, entrepreneurs, the working
class, and immigrants? In short, what was the impact of the railroads on nineteenth-century
American society?